The current National Geographic issue is running a massive series of articles on shale gas called The Great Shale Gas Rush. Below are some excerpts from some of the lead articles. -KS
Natural Gas Stirs Hope and Fear in Pennsylvania
by Marian Lavalle
Exploring the promise and challenge of a new energy supply.
Along the narrow two-lane roads that wind through Washington County in southwestern Pennsylvania, there is little sign that the surrounding pastures and hay bales, barns, homes, and children’s swing sets all are sitting on one of the largest reservoirs of natural gas in the world.
But at second glance, an observer can see red and white lattice towers rising here and there over the hillside. New gravel roads separate the thick woods and brush. Fields feature long stretches of grass that don’t quite match the surrounding meadow—recently reseeded places where new pipeline has been buried. Giant barrel-like structures, pipes and valves, painted green to blend in with the landscape, are condensate tanks and compressor stations. And chemical tank trucks, sand haulers, flatbeds stacked with lengths of pipe, and cement mixers seem to be rumbling in every direction.
It’s all part of a new energy industry that’s being built here. This is the epicenter of the Marcellus shale…
…Billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens says the United States ought to be producing vehicles to take advantage of domestic shale gas and break its foreign oil dependence. “This is our chance,” Pickens told The Philadelphia Inquirer in an interview on the Marcellus shale. “I think it’s almost divine intervention that we had all this gas show up at this time in the deal.”
Gas companies in Pennsylvania also frame their role as a pivotal one in the big U.S. energy picture. “We’ve talked a lot about taking control of our energy future in this country,” says Matt Pitzarella, spokesman for Range Resources, the first company to drill in the Marcellus and one of the most prolific drillers. “Now we have that opportunity, and it really was literally beneath our feet all this time.”
…But all this means building a big extractive industry in a state that hasn’t seen this kind of development in decades, right near homes and schools, in the midst of rural farmland, and close to treasured parks and forests. (Related: “Parks, Forests Eyed for the Fuel Beneath”)
For Pennsylvanians, even generations past the heyday of the state’s big coal- and coal-fired steel industries, it’s hard to forget the havoc that an energy business can wreak on the environment. To remind them, there are 260 million tons of abandoned waste coal in piles that mar about 8,500 acres across the state. And more than 5,510 miles of the state’s streams are impaired by discharges from 220,000 acres of abandoned coal mine lands, Pennsylvania’s worst water pollution problem.
…So the future of the boom hangs in the balance. How successfully producers will apply their new technology, whether they can add wealth to a place while preserving its cherished land and water, and how much fuel they can provide a world in dire need of cleaner energy—all will be decided on Pennsylvania’s changing farmland, in its forests, and in its shale.
Forcing Gas Out of Rock With Water
by Marian Lavalle
Harlan Shober remembers how cars lined Hickory Ridge Road in the spring of 2008 with curiosity-seekers hoping for a glimpse of the first Marcellus shale gas flare in Chartiers Township, Pennsylvania.
“I live on an opposite hill, where I could see the top of the flare, and my house was rumbling, it was that loud,” recalls Shober, president of the township board of supervisors. “It was overcast, and the flame would bounce up against the clouds. You could see the glow from Pittsburgh,” 25 miles away.
The eerie sight heralded the arrival of a new phase of life in this rural community of 7,200 people—one of the hottest spots in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale boom, with more than 40 natural gas wells drilled here in the past two years.
But the fiery scene that takes place above ground after wells are completed in certain circumstances—a controlled burn-off of initial gas for several days—is not as dramatic as what is happening more than a mile beneath the surface.
There, a new combination of old oil industry technologies has unlocked a giant resource geologists thought was unattainable for 75 years…
…An Unconventional Approach
The conventional way to produce natural gas is to drill and extract it out of “traps,” or folds and pockets in underground sandstone layers. Scientists have long known there was also natural gas in the soft rock layer called shale, formed by millions of years of heat and pressure from dead algae that mixed with mud at the deep bottom of ancient seas that once covered land in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Geologists believe the gas found in sandstone traps seeped out of this rich source rock…
…Geologist Bill Zagorski, now a vice president of the gas company Range Resources, knew about the shale history in 2003, when he was working on a problematic well southwest of Pittsburgh. Although Range is now based in Fort Worth, Texas, the company had its roots in Ohio and the Appalachian Basin, and so had an active conventional exploration and production operation in Pennsylvania. Zagorski’s division, then known as Great Lakes Energy, was aiming for a promising trap in the Oriskany sandstone, 8,500 feet (2,590 meters) below the surface, and 2,000 feet (610 meters) below the Marcellus shale. The Oriskany was the bread-and-butter target for the small oil and gas firms that were still making modest finds Pennsylvania. It was a decent business, although too trivial for major oil companies.
But in this well, which had seemed such a good prospect, the drillers came up with nothing. “Well, nobody likes a dry hole, but it was an expensive dry hole,” Zagorski says. “We were kind of at a crossroads on what to do.”
Coincidentally, Zagorski had a chance to visit a geologist friend in Texas, who was studying the implications of an exciting development unfolding in the Barnett shale near Dallas-Fort Worth. Iconoclastic oilman George Mitchell, with years of effort that flew in the face of conventional industry wisdom, had earlier succeeded in coaxing gas out of the shale by hydraulic fracturing (fracking). The “slick” water frack that proved successful was different from the type the oil industry had been using for more than 50 years to get wells to produce. Mitchell used a huge volume of water and fewer of the gel-like chemicals that reduce friction. A logical step for saving money in the energy-industry bust of the late 1990s, it happened to fracture the shale more effectively. Sand mixed into the water kept the paper-thin shale fractures propped open to allow the gas to release.
In 2002, a bigger firm, Devon Energy, had purchased Mitchell’s company. Now, a year later, Devon attacked the shale by combining fracking with another technique that was its specialty—horizontal drilling. The results were stupendous…
…A Massive Resource Unlocked
What they found—and it took at least three more years of experimental wells to confirm it—was that the Marcellus shale could produce at a rate some four orders of magnitude higher than conventional Pennsylvania wells. Those figures are measured in thousand cubic feet, or Mcf (based on the Latin word for “thousand”). Conventional wells in the Keystone State yielded 100 Mcf to 500 Mcf of natural gas per day. Horizontal wells in the Marcellus shale, which underground typically reach out 3,500 feet from the wellhead, now yield from 1 million Mcf to as high as 10 million Mcf or 15 million Mcf per day.
…Beginning one year ago, Range Resources tried a new approach—reusing the wastewater to frack new wells. By filtering the water to remove solids that might interfere with equipment and treating the water with antibacterial agents, the company found it could get the water clean enough to reuse in fracking. The company now is using 100 percent of its wastewater to frack new wells (although because of the large volumes needed, the company still has to add fresh water to the mix.) And the company says in the impoundments where it stores the wastewater until use, it includes bird netting, security and privacy fencing, solar-powered aeration, liner that is six times thicker than that used in landfills, and electronic monitoring to notify officials if there is a leak.
But the amount of wastewater that will be produced in the growing shale gas business is great enough that research is continuing on what to do with it. “It’s going to be a portfolio approach with water disposal,” says Pitzarella of Range. “We still need to reuse water, we are going to have to do some distillation and crystallization and different things. We’re still going to need underground injection.”…
Parks, Forests Eyed for the Fuel Beneath
by Marian Lavalle
UPDATED, October 26, 2010: Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell has placed a moratorium on further leasing of state forest land for gas drilling.
Whether they come for whitewater rafting through the Youghiogheny River Gorge, or to enjoy the vistas at the edge of the Laurel Highlands, Pennsylvania’s highest mountains, visitors flock each season to Ohiopyle State Park.
But a new guest interested in work, not recreation, is seeking entry to the 20,500-acre woodland, 70 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
Global Geophysical Services, a Texas-based seismic survey company, wants to begin testing in the park for potential natural gas drilling sweet spots, state officials say. The reason: all of Ohiopyle—its trails and campgrounds, and even the mighty Yough (pronounced “yawk”)—sits atop the Marcellus shale.
And even though this is ostensibly a protected area, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania did not purchase the subsurface mineral rights for the vast majority of land in its 117 parks when the recreation areas were established decades ago. State officials fear there is little they will be able to do to stop gas development in the Pennsylvania park system, including at popular Ohiopyle, the park where the pressure for gas exploration has been most intense…
…Nearly half the Pennsylvania state forestland in the shale formation, 700,000 acres, is now leased for drilling. There are a number of older oil and shallow gas wells in the forests. But 96 percent of the $434 million to flow to the state in energy business bonuses, rental, and royalties since 2007 have been from Marcellus producers, who did not begin leasing new acreage until 2008.
The new shale drilling could have a more significant impact on public lands than conventional oil and gas wells of the past, concluded an assessment (pdf) by the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) first published in 2008 and updated last year. While conventional oil or gas finds are in limited pockets, the shale gas is locked in rock continuously throughout the formation. One of the positives, the NPS noted, is that the horizontal drilling technique used in the shale gas industry could allow producers to choose well sites away from sensitive areas and reach the gas from a distance. Still, the NPS report said, “It is conceivable that over the course of many years wells could be drilled on every available spacing unit.”
Also, the shale gas rigs are larger and require more space than the traditional oil and gas equipment. Even though the sites are reclaimed after drilling, leaving only a small unit of pipes and valves at the wellhead commonly called a “Christmas tree,” four to six acres of surface disturbance is likely at each site. That’s more than twice the 1.5 to 3 acres needed for a conventional drill site. And drilling in a forest means cutting down trees…
…Who Owns Mineral Rights?
In addition to the impact from development on private land near the National Parks, the federal government—like Pennsylvania—does not own the mineral rights in the majority national park and historic area land overlying the Marcellus. In fact, private landowners hold the drilling and extraction rights for two-thirds of the 170,300 acres (69,000 hectares) of those 13 NPS units, says Pat O’Dell, petroleum engineer with NPS’s Geologic Resources Division. In the majority of cases, that is because even the surface areas are privately owned. At Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River, for example, the federal government only owns 100 acres (40 hectares) of the 80,000 acres (32,375 hectares) in the unit.
The Park Service has struggled for years with this issue. In the late 1970s Congress gave NPS authority to regulate some production, even where it doesn’t own the subsurface rights. NPS can require that producers obtain approval and secure bonds to pay for reclamation before operations begin, as long as the gas company must cross federally owned land or water to get to the well site. But there may not be a need to cross federal land in all cases in the Marcellus, so the regulations may not always apply, the NPS report noted. In a process that was begun before the shale development, but is now exceedingly relevant for the NPS units in the Marcellus, the Park Service is working to revise the regulations to ensure some oversight of production operations within park units, even if drillers don’t cross federal land…
*This report is produced as part of National Geographic’s Great Energy Challenge initiative, sponsored by Royal Dutch Shell, which recently acquired a stake in the Marcellus shale. National Geographic maintains autonomy over content.
Read the entire special report, with photos, interactive map and illustration of the process, at THE GREAT SHALE GAS RUSH.
